What Daniel Ellsberg Feared About Iran: A Prophecy From Beyond the Grave

New York City at midnight. A time when the underworld river flows into the new dawn of aspiration. I was in the radio studio of WOR, one of the most powerful AM stations on the East Coast -- there nominally to promote my book “The Merchant of Power: Sam Insull, Thomas Edison and the Creation of the Modern Metropolis” (Palgrave, 2006). The studio was blocks away from Ground Zero, where the fog of war was still clouding our national defense policy.

“What is your greatest fear concerning global security?’ I asked the older man seated across from me. At that point, ironically, I was not being interviewed by the former shock-jock host Joey Reynolds. I was invited to query Daniel Ellsberg, a man I considered a hero (and told him so) for sacrificing his freedom and life to copy and release the Pentagon Papers.

“I fear that the United States will attack Iran,” Ellsberg told me before he retreated into the Gotham night. This was more than a well-educated guess at the time since the Neocon universe of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz had declared the Islamic Republic part of an “Axis of Evil.”

Had he not engaged in sending zeroxed copies of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and Washington Post (this was 1971, well before email) Ellsberg would’ve been known as a minor footnote in history. He graduated from Harvard, later earning a PhD in economics, before serving as a Marine in Viet Nam from 1954-1957. After his service, he worked as a top advisor in the State and Defense Departments, eventually landing at the RAND corporation, a top defense consulting firm.

Not only would Ellsberg qualify as the smartest guy in the room, he had seen battlefields and could discern the big picture. The U.S. was losing the war in Viet Nam, which it had adopted from France in the 1950s. Under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, though, the war had been rebranded as a winnable struggle against communist expansion in Asia. If Viet Nam was lost to its proxy sponsors the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, what was the next “domino” to fall? The Philippines? Japan? That was the U.S. geopolitical paranoia ran at the time, which spurred American generals to order more bombing than all of World War II. No president wanted to lose a war in the wake of the Korean conflict and carnage inflicted by Hitler and Japan.

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Ellsberg saw the truth in the Pentagon Papers, which spelled out in 7,000 dense consultantspeak pages how futile the Viet Nam war became. Before the last American helicopter lifted off from the American embassy in April, 1975, it’s estimated that one million Vietnamese and 60,000 U.S. soldiers were dead. President Nixon saw Ellsberg’s heroic act as treason; Ellsberg was arrested and imprisoned. It was only when a federal judge had learned that Ellsberg’s psychiatric records were burglarized by Nixon’s clandestine “plumbers” that Ellsberg would be released. He spent the rest of his life as an activist and author, warning of the perils of war and nuclear arms. An international award in his name “honors the integrity and courage of whistleblowers and their allies for disclosing information that significantly enhances free public or scientific debate to bolster democracy and the public’s right to know.”

I’ve written about Ellsberg before, yet I still can’t avoid reflecting on that night in New York. It’s rare that you meet a prophet. It’s even rarer that we act upon prophecies en masse. The earth is still heating up like a pot boiling over. We are still over-dependent on fossil fuels and cruel regimes and corporations that insist on drilling, pumping, shipping and refining carbon-heavy fuels. Armies are still being engaged over petro resources.

Ellsberg saw the world through the lens of a realist, soldier and economist. Yet don’t get me wrong: Iran is certainly not Viet Nam. Iran is a nation of 92 million people nearly three times larger than France. The Islamic Republic’s oppressive theocratic regime is entrenched and shutting down the flow of 25% of the world’s supply of oil and methane (as I write this).

As a predominantly Shia sect, Iranian mullahs have been in conflict with its Arab Sunni neighbors for about 1,400 years. Unlike George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner during the Second Gulf War, however, any photo op trumpeting a quick victory in Iran will be fake news.

I have no idea what the Trump regime envisions as an endgame in this unlawful attack — or there is even a coherent plan. Yet the crux of the war may be more about secure, hegemonic control of existing petro resources. The middle-school bully excuse for casus belli -- oozing like pus from the White House -- might just be a deadly game of oil/gas “keep away” from China, which, to its credit, is scaling up big time on renewable energy and electric vehicles.

Nevertheless, to paraphrase Dylan, a black rain is gonna fall. In Iran and throughout the Gulf States, though, the dark torrent has already begun and fouled the air after bomb blasts. The sooner we employ renewable energy and non-carbon-based fuels, the brighter our outlook for survival on this planet. Transforming our economy to focus on green energy, transportation, health care and jobs is the first step in eliminating the toxic reason for fighting over fossil fuels.

Still, yet another senseless war obscures the reality of an overheating planet and the greenhouse gases that are fueling climate change. In the weeks before his death in 2023, Ellsberg didn’t stop prophesizing, though. He gave interviews linking his anti-war activism with the need for veracity on climate change.

“Almost no single revelation will cause significant change by itself,” Ellsberg said in a Washington Post video. “But in combination with other information—other truth-telling—courage is contagious.”

Vincit Omnia Veritas

(Truth Conquers All)

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I am the author of “Lightning Strikes: Timeless Lessons in Creativity from the Life and Work of Nikola Tesla” (Union Square, 2016), and 18 other books. This essay was not produced by AI. I am a sentient writer, journalist, author, environmentalist, speaker, musician and elected county forest preserve commissioner who’s written 19 books and contributed to The New York Times, Next Avenue, Bloomberg and Reuters.